He says he’s the one that found it, though he wasn’t sure, from a walkaway, what it was at first. Not until he came right to it, until he knelt in the sand beside the bloat and sog that he realized. And even closer he wasn’t sure, at that time, what it was, what with his poor eyes, that… Read more →
He’s bent in the bushes, under a Manchineel tree whose sap seeps into skin, burns internally, results in terrible blisters. His camera looks like a machine gun, its bipod buried in the sand, its muzzle towel-wrapped, like the man himself. I follow the trajectory of the lens’s gaze, but everyone at the hotel’s beach looks tiny and the same. Out… Read more →
North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. – James Joyce, “Araby” I was the boy who sat far from the lake with a sketchbook on his lap while the other kids swam and splashed and horsed around in the water. Sometimes, when the counselors… Read more →
My footprint nearly filled my father’s as I followed him in the frosty woods. The sun was sleeping somewhere beyond the trees that surrounded us, the only sound the soft crunching of our footsteps. The brown leather quiver on my father’s back was filled with three red fletched arrows. He was slightly stooped as he walked, head down, choosing his… Read more →
You go back when you can’t deal. It’s kind of like jail, when you come back, you commit a crime so that you don’t have to face anything. There’re only so many days of polishing the boots you have at your home, while your wife is making excuses to go to The Home Depot. “What do you think I did… Read more →
Postcards Day after I purchase the snake I get a postcard. From my brother Doug. Older by six years. Hey Bro it starts. Doug doesn’t phone or email. Sends postcards. Usually fences. Split-rail fences like out west. Or wide plank fences that keep back horses. All kinds. This latest being a high fence like Tom Sawyer painted. We grew… Read more →
I am dreaming. My new monomania, Kelli from acting class, Virginia slim, long tawny hair, edge-free face – basic nightmare – verbally assaults me in my car, in Brooklyn, my home. Our real-life conversation on the college green is light and guarded but in my dream she dryly attacks my character, delivering her words with stretched vowels and the hard… Read more →
The Liu family didn’t agree on much. Nothing at all really, except my dumplings looked like insects, and they did. No matter how I tried, it didn’t matter. They stayed insects. Small lips with off-sized heads, impoverished bellies, and frail vertebrae threatening to dissolve in liquid-thin containers, but this is where the agreement ended. Each member of my wife’s family… Read more →
At the Middle Country Road underpass, just beyond Smithtown, the swirling snow began to melt as soon as it hit the ground. As the temperature fell, dark patches of ice formed near the edges of the parkway. Moving cars kept the road from freezing, but, as the traffic thinned, fingers of black ice crept toward the center. * * *… Read more →